Monsters
by Scarabbug
Summary: A young Spyro encounters a ferocious beast in the depths of the swamp. Or maybe not.


**This is kind of a reflection on a previous fanfiction I wrote entitled "Swamp Blues" but it's not necessary to read that in order to understand this. They're utterly different stories, with entirely different scenarios. Reviews and concrit are both appreciated. **

**NB: This fic is inspired by a Final Fantasy fic. I'm not sure which continuity it was, but I believe something called a "Catcherpillar" was involved. **

**I also burrowed the idea of Mudnuts from a children's fantasy book entitled "**_**The Wingsinge**_**r". They're delicious, apparently. **

* * *

Monsters. 

They had been playing hide and seek amongst the bulrushes, and Spyro had been winning.

Well, he figured that being able to stay hidden for as long as it took the hot sun to travel halfway across the sky counted as winning. Their games never seemed to have any set rules, except for "run around and get as dirty as you possibly can before lunch". He was starting to think that Sparx had given up looking and gone home; and maybe he should be going too, before the sun got any higher and the weather any stickier. Dad had promised to take them to see the fireflies in the Western Lake, if they behaved themselves, and Spyro was sure he'd heard something about there being Mudnuts for dinner tonight...

This was what Spyro was considering when he heard a noise from deep inside a nearby clump of marshweeds; a kind of ugly screech and a ragged scuffling, following by the sound of old reeds breaking.

Spyro stopped dead in his tracks.

He'd heard noises like that before. Mostly late at night, when he and Sparx crept onto the stoop to listen to the distant calls of creatures they had never seen. Whenever mom or dad caught them they would be sent back to the nest with a firm thwap round the head, but they had continued sneaking out anyway, just to listen to those strange noises and snigger together to hide their fear.

It was a little different now that he was alone. A little... scarier to hear those sounds in the middle of the day and in a place where dragonflies liked to hang out with their friends.

In fact, forget _little_: it was a _lot_ different, and somehow the daylight didn't do anything to make him feel better. After all in the darkness, things were cast in shadows, hidden under the blackness and could turn out to be anything at all. In the daylight there could be no disguising whatever horrible thing might be out there.

The reeds shuffled again and the sound of screeching came a second time, following by a noise like creaking wood and heavy breathing. Spyro took a deep breath. He had that familiar burning sensation in the back of his throat again: the one he always got when he was alone and afraid of what he was about to see.

But he wasn't going to run for dad. He _wasn't_. If he did that then the thing making all the scary noises would probably turn out to be an old tree trunk or a spawning Frogweed or something else equally yucky but completely un-dangerous, and then Sparx would laugh at him and call him an oversized baby...

No. Spyro wasn't going to run.

He pushed his nose through the woody stalks (stiff and brittle and already being forced aside by the newly healthier growth of this season. Things never thrived for long in the swamps). It was here, lying like a bird in a makeshift nest, that he found the monster.

It wasn't very big. Not much larger than Spyro himself, in fact; and nothing at all like the scary pictures that he sometimes saw in his dreams. Spyro had never seen a real monster before and he had never imagined they would look like this – all covered in tattered, grimy fur and with bright colours blurred across their face, like painted pits of wood. It's huge chest rising up and down in a way that looked very much like panic.

It took Spyro a moment to realise that the strange, small creature was hurt. Probably badly. There was a thick, brown-red stain creeping steadily through the soil, and its painted face was all cut up, like something with sharp claws and teeth had bitten into it. Spyro sniffed. The air around the monster's body reeked of smouldering fur and ash.

It opened its eyes: they were yellow in a shade that shouldn't have existed and glazed over with thin, white film. They glared at Spyro in a combination of hate and horror.

Spyro bolted.

* * *

He came to a halt at the edge of the clearing and looked back. The reeds were shuddering from his rapid departure, but the space where the monster had been lay still and calm. The beast hadn't chased him the way he had expected it to when he saw those ugly, anger filled eyes.

It was probably still down there. Waiting for him.

He didn't _have_ to go back, Spyro's brain told him, as he began picking his way gingerly through the muddy roots that he had ripped up in his hurry to escape. After all, it was just an ugly monster that had crawled into the swamp to get away from something hunting it. Spyro had seen this kind of thing happen before as he was growing up... And it had looked at him so angrily.

But of _course_ it would look at him that way, the other side of Spyro's mind retorted. After all, it probably thought he was an ugly monster too; a beast, just like the one which had attacked it.

What was it that mom had told him once? "_Everything is ugly to someone in the world, and nobody is ugly to their mother._" Spyro got the feeling she had said this to comfort _him_, rather than to reassure filthy, furry monsters, but that didn't matter. The rule was still the same, right?

Spyro pulled in his wings to keep them from shaking and peered back through the roots.

The monster was still looking at him. Or rather, at the spot where Spyro had been before. It was blinking its small, glazed eyes and its chest still heaved and fell in an uneven pattern. Spyro couldn't tell when it was breathing in or breathing out.

It was with great courage that he managed to whisper a very quiet: 'Um... hello.'

The effect was explosive. As soon as Spyro had pulled himself together at the edge of the clearing, he looked back into the slough. The bed of roots was more dishevelled than ever now, since the beast had ripped up most of the surrounding reeds in its sudden fury. The blotchy red-brown stains had spread across the patch of land where it was lying and Spyro could make out now where sharp teeth had bitten into its hairy chest.

Spyro shuddered to think what huge creature could have attached a monster like this. Whatever it was, it must've been weed-freaking-_massive_.

_Now_ what did he do?

Mom wouldn't have any advice for something like this, Spyro thought, picking at the dirt beneath his feet. His claws were dragging in the mud, as of the swamp waters themselves were trying to pull him back to where the monster was. But that was silly, Spyro told himself. The swamp was just dead mud and roots and Frogweed. It didn't have any kind of life that could convince him to do anything.

He didn't have to return. He _didn't_.

Spyro crept back through the scattered weeds with all the stealth that a dragonfly that was too heavy to fly _could_ possess. The creature knew he was there the whole time, Spyro was sure of it, but it made no move against him. It merely watched, chest heaving, breathing thick. It gnashed its teeth at him and snarled and spat and screeched like something which was in a great deal of pain, but every shriek seemed quieter than the one before it had been.

Spyro took a deep, deep breath. The back of his throat was burning again.

'... 'M not... scared of you.'

The creature snorted. If Spyro hadn't known better, he would've sworn it was laughing at him for lying to it. It was a _smart one_, this monster. It knew what he was, and maybe even _who_ he was, and it knew, for whatever reason, that Spyro was something that it was supposed to kill.

But it also didn't seem to care too much about that anymore.

Spyro stepped backwards through the reeds. The brown stain was getting too close to him for comfort, the mud beneath the creature's body bubbled from the rising warmth. It really was getting very warm out here.

The monster looked at Spyro. Spyro looked back at the monster. Neither moved.

They stayed like this for a very long time, while Spyro pondered what to do. Mom and dad wouldn't want anything to do with a swamp monster. And maybe he wasn't _supposed_ to try and help one anyway. After all, it was only a monster right? All it really wanted to do was kill him and everyone he knew. One less monster meant that one less larvae would be snatched from their nest in the dead of night. One less creepy cry for him and Sparx to make fun of each other over.

The monsters flails gradually trailed off into twitches.

The sun rose higher, and then began sinking again. Orange lights began to flicker across the surface of the swamp. The leaves in the willows overhead turned brown in 

the dusk and the shadows spread, deep and dark amongst the bulrushes. The cries of Mushroom Creatures and the high pitched chirrups of Night Birds could be heard through the darkness. Still Spyro stood before the monster, crouched into a ball, wings wrapped carefully around his body still he had no more idea of what to do now than he had hours earlier.

There would be no one coming now. He had imagined that if he waited long enough, the creature that had had attacked the monster might show up to finish the job. Or else some of the monster's friends might have come to take it away. When neither of these things happened, Spyro was left at a total loss of what to do.

The wind changed –or rather, the wind _appeared _out of nowhere, when only a moment earlier the day had been as still and calm as anything. Spyro looked up sharply from his thoughts, surprised into alertness. _Stupid_, he told himself irritably. He should know better than to drift off into thought like that when there was a monster that could tear his throat out less than six feet in front of him.

The Monster...

Spyro looked up at the creature's body and waited for the next twitch.

It was several minutes before Spyro realised that it wasn't going to happen. The creature's eyes weren't yellow anymore and the red-brown stain in the dirt wasn't getting any bigger. Tufts of its fur trembled in the breeze, but that was only sign of any movement that it gave.

All of a sudden it didn't look very much like a monster l. It didn't look like anything more than a heap of knotted fur and dirty, painted skin.

Spyro felt a shudder passing over his entire body.

Several minutes later, as the first cries of the rest of the Monsters that he and Sparx listened for every night became audible, Spyro finally thought to get back to his feet and run, as fast as his stumpy legs and flightless wings would take him.

* * *

_"The monsters of our childhood do  
not fade away, neither are they ever  
wholly monstrous. But neither, in my  
experience, do we ever reach a plane  
of detachment regarding our parents,  
however wise and old we may become.  
To pretend otherwise is to cheat."_

-John Lecarre


End file.
